


long and sweet, long and sharp

by odoridango



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Gen, Growing Up, Puberty, Rule 63, rule 63 eren
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-22
Updated: 2013-11-22
Packaged: 2018-01-02 08:19:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1054575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/odoridango/pseuds/odoridango
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eren grows up, and her hair grows with her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	long and sweet, long and sharp

**Author's Note:**

> Fill for an snkkink prompt:
> 
> So in all the fanart, girl Eren has long hair. And I just can't get over that. I mean, Eren tells Mikasa to cut hers because it could get in the way during training. So wouldn't (s)he cut her own too?
> 
> I'd like a fic that explains away this. Like, Carla always liked Eren's hair and brushing Eren's hair was their special bonding time. Or something like that.

  
Eren is a rough and tumble girl who wears her skirts and her hair short, comes home with rips and tears in her clothing and dark bruises on her face from tussling with the boys. Her mother's face crumples each time Eren climbs in through the door, skin painted black and blue, peppered with small cuts, and she soothes salves and tinctures over the tender skin, brushes delicate fingers over the bandages and presses a soft kiss to Eren's brow, wraps her arms around her daughter again and rocks a little, cups her daughter’s child-soft cheeks, strokes her hair, hugs her close.  
  
Eren knows she worries her mother to death, watches the other little girls in the square who don't wear their skirts above their knees, who don't wear loose shorts instead of petticoats, who say please and thank you and scream and run away when the boys try to pelt them with rotten berries, crying over torn dresses and spilt milk. And sometimes Eren does those things too, finds a vast flower field in the forest, digs through the soil and dirt to bring her mother the brightest and healthiest blooms, scales trees and endures splinters and scrapes to bring her mother wild crabapples and the freshest berries. So she compromises, and for every day spent with cuts healing on her skin, she spends three with her mother cooking in the kitchen, working on patching the winter clothes, learning how to wash the laundry and how best to wear her nice things like a real lady. But she is her mother’s daughter and it is not her father who she inherits her temper from, so Eren believes her mother when she says she doesn't teach these things to Eren so she can do them for the sake of a future husband, she teaches what she can so that when Eren is on her own, she will want for nothing—she will be able to feed herself, clothe herself, present herself so that no stranger will be able to laugh or shame her out of the streets. And Eren sees this every time her mother lays down the law in and out the house, scolds her father when he's mistaken, doesn't hesitate to bargain and haggle and call out the man who tries to cheat her of more money at the marketplace.  
  
She talks to Armin about these things, because Armin is her friend and she tells him everything.  He takes it in with an almost quiet melancholy, and when she shows him her cuts and bruises he asks, voice timid, if she's ever just thought about not fighting. And she gets angry, gets furious, because she kept her hair short for him, because when she hadn't the boys had pulled it, yanked her head back to fight her off, because while she fought them they didn't think of Armin, her precious friend who dreams big, dreams large, his aspirations reaching so far and wide beyond the walls that there is room for her to nestle there too, in the wonder of a world so expansive that she forgets to spend day after day thinking about how small and boring her future might be, stuck at home, caring for children, caring for a husband.  
  
And Armin says: But you loved your hair. You had beautiful hair. And he runs a hesitant hand through her fringe, and she closes her eyes, the motion soothing. You don't have to give everything up for me, Armin says. He blinks slowly, and the pages of the book in his lap turn quietly, softly, like a pinwheel.  
  
He remains solid, constant, a steady sunlit figure beneath the trees amidst a roiling change that takes place without her knowing. The boys have changed lately. When she shoves them away from Armin they only make the motions to fight, blustering uselessly instead of charging at her like they used to, their eyes lingering on the redness of the skin at her knees, the slenderness of her nape, the budding tenderness of her chest. This too, angers her, this contradictory world where she cannot fight even when things are wrong, where people will not fight her because she is changing, her body is changing, to the point where when a former bully eyes her on the street, takes in her chestnut hair and her bright green eyes, he flushes and cannot look away. The sellers in the market compliment her, say how like her mother she looks, call her cute, tell her she's becoming a little lady, isn't she, but the bareness of her nape is unsettling, vulnerable in the way the eyes of the older boys trace the way her hair feathers there, the same way they sometimes glance at Mikasa when she's gentle, the grace in her skin and the glow of her pale features. To them, Eren is fascinating because she's so familiar, an old hellion morphing to something else, something new.  
  
So Eren seeks protection in defiance, doesn't get her hair shorn at the usual time, grows it out until it pools in untidy split ends and fierce snarls. But she's never seen a happier look on her mother's face when she goes up to her with a pair of scissors and tells her to keep it long this time, and when she stays in on compromise days, she and Mikasa practice how to braid each other's hair, twine flowers into the strands and ask Armin how it looks. Each time, he smiles at them, says they look beautiful, and the warm feeling that rises in her chest is different from other warm feelings that she's felt before, and when she trades a look with Mikasa, she sees in the pleased curl of her mouth that her sister feels it too. Now when the boys try to bother her, she hides behind her armor, goads them to the fight with a glimpse of tan neck and the flash of green eyes behind her bangs, the cowards who won't fight her because she's a girl, the cowards who simply fight to feel more powerful, and if they're so weak they can't pick their balls up from where they've dropped them, she'll show them how much stronger she is even with long hair, even with her femininity.  
  
Even now, in the military, she knows the value of that compromise, keeps her hair long but bundles it up in the back, because her mother taught her to be proud to be a woman, and Armin and Mikasa taught her there was something strong in the sway of her hips that had nothing to do with being female, but everything to do with the strength of conviction and the will to protect.  
  
And if she still likes the feel of Mikasa's calloused fingers weaving small braids into her hair, or the way Armin likes to catch and tug chestnut locks playfully to get her attention, well, nobody has to know.


End file.
